This is the EXACT issue we had when Apple Pay/Android Pay came out. The solution was for POS vendors to just implement both, always.
SO, that's the solution here.
This is FUD spread by Apple after poor uptake of Apple Pay. The reality is that many retail chains and restaurants either hadn't enabled the NFC chips in their payment terminals, or were using old terminals that didn't even have NFC functionality, and thus did not work with Apple Pay. Retailers that supported NFC payment prior to the launch of Apple Pay supported Apple Pay at launch.
Retailers are not about spending millions of dollars to upgrade working point-of-sale machines just to make Apple more money.
https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/25/cvs-disabling-nfc-apple...
Notably, CVS did not restore NFC payments until 2018, 2 years after CurrentC had failed, because that is when they had NFC-ready POS terminals in all stores. (RiteAid started accepting NFC in 2015, since more of their stores had NFC-ready POS terminals.)
Do you have evidence for this claim? (Do you have inside knowledge?) It seems to have worked well enough for reviewers before it was cut off after Apple Pay's official launch. [1]
According to a New York Times article [2]:
> The problem is that under the terms of their MCX contractual agreement, they are not supposed to accept competing mobile payments products like Apple Pay, according to multiple retailers involved with MCX, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. If these retailers break their contracts, they will face steep fines for doing so, these people said.
In [1], MCX's CEO was asked to address that article's claim, and responded that the exclusivity requirement did exist (albeit lasting "months, not years"), yet MCX had not "ordered CVS to turn off Apple Pay". But he "speculated that CVS might have simply done so because it had signed the exclusivity policy". It's hard to make sense of these seemingly contradictory statements. If the exclusivity policy included Apple Pay and other NFC mobile wallets (which you'd expect it to, since there weren't any other major competitors), what's the distinction between a contractual requirement and an "order"? Was it just that CVS had the option to continue accepting Apple Pay, but at the cost of paying fines? If the exclusivity policy didn't include Apple Pay, then why would he "speculate" that it was the reason CVS had disabled NFC?
Regardless, it was indeed "months" after that interview when MCX members started enabling Apple Pay: first Best Buy in April, then Rite Aid in August. Notably, when Best Buy did so, Ars Technica received this statement from MCX: [3]
> While all MCX merchants do agree to exclusivity, those provisions are designed to expire and as such as are limited in both time and scope.
This strongly implies that the "exclusivity" was indeed a requirement to not support Apple Pay, and that it had expired.
As for CVS, they responded to the death of CurrentC by starting their own mobile payment platform, CVS Pay, in 2016. So they still had a competitor to promote, which explains why they waited until 2018 to enable NFC payments.
Target and Walmart, two other former MCX members, each did the same, and both of them still don't support NFC payments today, even though at this point they've had many years to replace their POS terminals. Walmart, for example, stated in 2018 that "Walmart Pay is the exclusive form of mobile payment accepted at Walmart and we have no plans for that to change" [5], strongly implying that the reason they don't support NFC is to preserve that "exclusivity", not due to technical limitations.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2014/11/4/11632560/what-are-the-anti-app...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/technology/apple-pay-runs...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/best-buy-will-accept...
[4] https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/11/cvs-pharmacy-launches-its-...
[5] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/21/walmart-no-plans-to-acc...
Perhaps they were lying, or mistaken.
But you were specifically calling out my claim of chain stores deliberately eschewing Apple Pay as FUD, which is weird, because they were quite open about it at the time. Walmart has kept up their QR-code-only approach, while the others gave up on CurrenC eventually.
The store chooses which credit cards to accept (at the birds-eye level, i.e., Amex, Discover, Mastercard, Visa), and the POS sends the transaction to the appropriate card processor based on the identifying digits in the card number (the first 4).
Apple Pay transactions are identified as Visa transactions, so Visa would handle the transaction...if the POS terminal is configured to accept NFC cards. Most older ones don't even have NFC functionality, and until 2 years ago even terminals with NFC functionality didn't have it enabled because they were shipped before NFC payments was a thing. Today, almost all POS terminals come with NFC payment built-in and enabled.
What's the deal with that? I've pretty much given up even trying to tap with my Amex because of how frequently it gives that message.